Whitehall must learn from Estonia's e-government

Thursday 24 May 2007 18.47 EDT
First published on Thursday 24 May 2007 18.47 EDT

A decade after we nerds started using the term, "e-government" has entered the chattering class's lexicon. "E-government? Isn't that what they call the town council in Yorkshire?" one of the wags on Radio Four's News Quiz quipped last week. The reference was to a special case of e-government, Estonia, and the claim that its online existence was under attack from Russia.

Estonia is a special case because the Baltic state has one of the world's most advanced electronic administrations. On independence, it took advantage of small size and made a clean sweep of obsolete Soviet bureaucracy, installing a state-of-the art government machine. For the past few years, it has been hailed as an exemplary e-government, where citizens and businesses enthusiastically sign on to pay taxes, notify changes of circumstances and vote online.

British government modernisers have often gazed with envy at their Baltic counterparts. The Estonians seem to be immune from the large IT project disasters and privacy backlashes that have made e-government a hot potato to be passed around British ministerial portfolios as quickly as possible. In Britain so far the main political impact of e-government has been not excitement, but justifiable grumbles at the impact on rural post offices and less justifiable whingeing at road pricing.

Any envy in Whitehall evaporated last week, however, as Estonia encountered the downside of 21st century e-government: vulnerability to attack. For the UK government seems hell-bent on pursuing a similar road towards vulnerability.

Despite ministerial talk of localism, the entire thrust of the programme of public service reform is towards centralisation. The eventual aim is for all online transactions with the government to go through just two websites, Direct.gov for citizens and Businesslink for businesses. Government agencies will increasingly share systems such as the Department for Work and Pensions' citizen database. Everyone is talking about "shared back offices" and "one-stop shops".

Much of this drive is welcome: it is patently daft for government to run more than 4,000 websites. One of the most promising innovations is the joint service centre, where a single office can help with needs from social security benefits and disabled parking permits to flu vaccinations.

Centralisation comes with penalties, however. One is that, however centralised services are arranged geographically, some users will lose convenience. Another penalty comes with size and complexity: government systems are already too big, and big and complex IT systems go wrong more often than small and simple ones.

Finally, as the Estonian experience shows, there is the vulnerability caused by creating a single point of failure. Not just to cyber-attack, but to old-fashioned terrorism. Not to mention industrial action: if the Treasury is considering taking on public-sector unions in the next spending round, it might want to reflect that picket lines can be shared services, too.

These questions and more will go in to the pot as Gordon Brown's administration works out what to do with the ramshackle, diverse and occasionally brilliant e-government infrastructure it inherits from the Blair years. One last thing: we don't call it e-government any more. Inside Whitehall, everyone's talking about transformational government, now. This time, the joke almost writes itself: "T-government? Does that mean everything stops for T?"

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